Bleep

Fresh from her Blacklips Bar compilation tracing the origins of queer music, performance, and drag in early 90s NYC, ANOHNI travels even further back to the inspiration that started it all. My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is her first album with The Johnsons in a decade, and an ode to the band’s namesake, drag queen and gay liberation revolutionary Marsha P. Johnson. Having carried the torch of Johnson’s and countless others’ memories throughout her career, ANOHNI channels them in a record of reckoning and epic release.

My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is an invitation to the heart, guts and all. While the fury and frustration of ANOHNI’s blazing solo debut HOPELESSNESS still appear in spades, they are mediated through a more introspective light, never afraid to shy away from the grotesque yet somehow making it beautiful. With a bustling ecosystem of instruments, she depicts the cruelty of loss and loneliness, the curiosity of martyrdom and freeing others from pain.

Through sweeping gestures of strings and smooth, golden sunrise guitars on ‘It Must Change’, ANOHNI’s signature wavering vibrato sends powerful lyrics loaded with emotion: “Your god is failing you, things must change.” Catharsis frames the impactful, bristling washes of guitar on ‘Go Ahead’, and the purring horns and lapping waves of percussion on ‘Sliver Of Ice’. Amidst the moments of healing and duress are the intense, soul baring cuts, where fireworks fly from ANOHNI’s graceful bellows on ‘Can’t’ with the band’s tightly locked arrangements, and desert shades of guitars on the explosive ‘Rest’ are set alight.

ANOHNI returns with The Johnsons to the very conception of her career, bringing some of her most emotionally potent work yet.